As a web developer, I’m often doing new (and interesting) things to stretch the boundaries of the browser. Sometimes, in doing so, the browser can hang or freeze, remaining in a state that makes it unresponsive.

Here are a few simple methods to force-close the browser on Windows and Linux, they can be expanded for other software executables as needed.

CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) was once the leader in the version/revision control space. Unfortunately, it has been neglected for years and most application developers have moved to different systems such as Subversion(SVN) or Git.

March Hare took ownership of the CVS code and made the last few releases available for free on Windows as CVSNT, however their software will make prompts to purchase a supported copy and add messages to commit logging.

Committed on the Free edition of March Hare Software CVSNT Client.
Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support:
http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/

While I openly support development of software such as CVS, these dialog messages and commit logs are often annoying. To remove them on Windows, a simple registry change must be made:

One or both of these may exist on your system, change value to ‘yes’.HKLM/Software/cvsnt/PServer, "HaveBoughtSuite"="yes"HKLM/Software/CVS/PServer, "HaveBoughtSuite"="yes"

Occasionally I’ve stumbled upon legacy javascript code that is used to determine javascript support by the visiting users. This often proves comical, because they are many times wasting time making checks for some “VERY OLD” browsers indeed! Here’s a rundown of the versions of javascript as well as their release dates and some common browser versions that implemented them.

The language attribute has long been deprecated and should generally be avoided, it’s original purpose was to support other scripting languages, notably VBScript, or particular JavaScript versions. Modern conventions rely on specifying the MIME type instead via the ‘type’ attribute.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> is now <script type="text/javascript">

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript1.1"> is now <script type="text/javascript1.1">